Where we’ve been, are now, and are going…

Where we’ve been?

We’ve taken a much longer break than we anticipated from contributing to this site… and are ok with it. Seasons ebb and flow, life changes, speeds up and slows down. So, we thought we’d give you a little insight into what’s been going on and where we are headed.

Fall has finally begun to settle in and our bodies are feeling ready to move into this next season of shorter days and new focuses. Our summer has been interesting and different for us, but also exactly what we wanted to pursue. The two most shaping occurrences were hosting a young girl through Safe Families and expanding our backyard micro farm.

As we outlined in our series that went through our Family Mission Statement, the first line states “We are followers of Jesus Christ and because of His sacrifice for us desire to compassionately serve others.” For us, a main way we have desired to do this is by caring for orphans and children in need. We took the step to become a Safe Family’s host family and were quickly welcoming an 18 month old girl into our home. She was with us for about a month and we cherished many sweet interactions with her and between her and our daughter. It was an incredible opportunity to nourish her body and soul while she was with us. But it was also extremely challenging in a lot of ways. We are thankful for the way that this opportunity has grown us as people and our heart to serve “the least of these”.

Another shaping activity this summer was tilling up a large plot in our backyard for a garden and building a second chicken coop to now house 14 ladies. Although we often still feel like we have no idea what we are doing, we’ve loved watching life happen in our backyard. It’s been transformative to dig our hands in the soil to pull out the biggest carrots we’ve ever seen, go on treasure hunts for potatoes, and see our daughter excitedly help harvest and consume tomatoes, peppers, and raspberries. Right in our very own backyard, we were able to observe the localized closed loop between the chickens, the soil, the vegetables, and even us. We want to shape our lifestyle to support these natural systems instead of impair them. Concepts like permaculture, forest gardens, and edible landscaping are new yet have challenged us to dream about the potential of feeding our family and others around us as we steward the land.

Where we are now?

While we are still evaluating these concepts and questions on a daily basis, a couple things we know is that we continue to be compelled to live out our Family Mission Statement every day. For us this has specifically looked like being connected to our food from the farm to the table. Cheese making and grinding our own flour to make sourdough breads – all with ingredients from farms that we are locally connected to – have been our evening entertainment.

Where are we going?

Our break from Creating Sustainable Roots was unintended but somewhat necessary. Although content never made it from our brains, through our fingertips, and onto the blog, I can assure you that we have not stopped our journey of living out our values daily and producing or processing future content. There is plenty more to write about and some already in progress. What was necessary for us was to take a step back and consider the bigger picture of Creating Sustainable Roots…. What is our goal? Who is our audience? What type of content is most valuable? What niche will we fill? Why should anyone even care?

We realized that although we have a mission statement for our family, this website in a lot of ways has lacked just that. I don’t think we have strayed off the path with any of the content we have produced to this point. But, going from post to post, and topic to topic always felt foggy, like we never quite knew what was just around the corner.

So where are we going… at this point, we see this space as a sort of journal to share the things we’ve been learning and doing. In essence, a compilation of thoughts, ideas, and some more practical things we’d like to pass down to future generations (and anyone who wants to join us along the way 🙂 )

That being said, we are SO glad you are here following along with us! We hope to have regular content up again soon and look forward to interacting with each of you along the way. When we started this whole thing last January we loved hearing from you and have missed that communication during our break this summer. But fear not! We are as committed as ever to Creating Sustainable Roots invite you to join the fun and adventuresome times ahead as we seek to live a simple and sustainable life.